Reflection, translation and revelation

As you’re reading this, you’ve clearly not been frightened off by the prospect of dealing with difficult questions. Questions like: ‘how can something be two very different things at the same time?’I must admit, all of this power-duality is intellectually messy. A bar of soap, great for cleaning up our thinking but really very difficult to keep a grip on.So, as a little incentive to keep you reading, if you make it to the end, I’ll claim something that I believe has never been described before in the entire of history of power analysis. Go on, you know you want to!In the last two Substacks, we’ve been looking at the idea of power-duality, how single definitions of power often work in ways that actually oppose themselves, ending up as something they can’t really be. Two sides of the same coin but each unable to face the other.Anthony Giddens (1984) was very interested in this idea of power-duality but he had a very different take on it compared to other thinkers we’ve covered in the previous parts of this series. In The Constitution of Society (1984), he describes a sort of ‘duality of structure’ operating in society. This tells us about how the mechanisms of society are far from unified and separate meaning to project different themes at different times.His thinking is more about giving us some scaffolding or empirical reality to trace and detail the complexity of the truth-power relationship. The conclusions still offer up their own troubled places. These describe how social rules and resources can both constrain and enable action. In reality, it can be almost impossible to locate where one of these effects starts and the other ends. We know structures are doing this to us, we just can’t pin down why or where very easily.For Giddens, power was not separate from communication or truth. Instead, it was a product of society’s structures, woven into the very conditions of the interaction they are required to have on us as we go about our business.Here, agents within social life, such as the rules and institutions we rely on, our cultural cogs or ideological indentations, make what he calls ‘validity claims’ which are then mediated by the asymmetries of power that exist already. This adds nuance to the truth–power relationship, highlighting the dual role of structures as something that both constrain as well as enable agency.It could be argued, and perhaps convincingly so for many, that this tends to show the power-medium we have talked about as little more than a re-description of this structuration theory. After all, both perspectives reject the idea of power as a sort of currency, unaffected by the circumstances it finds itself in. Both see a power formed unevenly and always in a malleable state. Both models show power as relational and reproductive, mediating interaction and making power capable of constructing or maintaining the levers of social reality. Similarly, the power-medium, like Giddens’ idea of structuration, is not something imposed on truth or power but the way social action becomes possible. In this sense, and in both cases, stability and transformation arise from the same generative mechanism.However, power-duality within the power-medium remains distinctive, different from what Giddens describes. For instance, Giddens says power emerges through the way structure and agency work together, via how they interact. It runs through social systems reproducing or rejecting these structures as it does so.However, the power-medium, treats power not as a property of this type of interaction but as the medium through which even structuration itself occurs. It is inter-structural, where power is the connective tissue between orders, systems, or interpretive domains generally not the structures themselves. Power here is not relational but translational. It operates as the medium that allows different structural logics, whether these be economic, linguistic, technological or normative, to interact and even to transform one another. It is not the will to do so, not the impulse that combines agency and structure which structuration permits. It is what allows us to see and do this.Admittedly, this is a level of ontological abstraction or generality beyond even Giddens’ model but it remains one anchored too in social practices and institutions. Giddens gives us a theory of structuration. The power-medium gives us a theory of mediation. They occupy different, if complementary, planes.This further abstraction of power is not a weakness of the power-medium account so long as it remains operationally grounded. The idea of duality in the power-medium is capable of illuminating how power functions as connective tissue in real, multi-systemic contexts, like digital infrastructures, ecological interdependencies or transnational governance.As important as the views of Foucault, Habermas and Giddens have been to the way we think about society, they have also left us with the challenge of being a lot clearer about truth and power when we come across them, and certainly about the transactions they talk about or the instances they imagine account for real life.Yet, this must also presume a lesser known state, certainly a place of a less travelled analysis. It’s one that frightens sociologists. It means seeing power as a place, a procedure, an elemental entity in society and something that exists only in combination with other matters, and as all of these things at the same time.Power can only be convened, translated or realised by a declaration in favour of a social existence, by an acceptance of our mutual interdependence and a determination to live a social as opposed to isolated life. Power tests only for a relationship with others and imposes just one rule as a result. Whatever we want must be declared and knowable, even if this is difficult or nigh on impossible for others to see in practice.Power places us all first on not so much an equal footing but with a shared obligation. The nature and function of the relationship we are prepared to accept here is what remains to be agreed. Only then can power become something like a negotiation or transaction, a product of society’s structural routes and byways described by Giddens.This is not the type of settlement for truth and power we usually find helpful, want to pursue or have much chance of accepting without caveat. To find it, we need to ponder more carefully the accepted descriptions of the truth-power relationship. We must ask, just how and why power locks to truth in the first place or where it sits when it is waiting to do so?Our vision here is always a little blurred and changes each time we take a look. The unresolved tensions between power dualities points to a need for a broader understanding of power. The power-medium is able to accommodate paradox, agency and contest because it does not insist that what emerges always requires resolution.It is the means through which different certainties, frictions and doubts can be reviewed, essential distinctions clarified and contingent moments of accord reasoned into being. It is the socialisation of what ideas demand of us, settling a means to understand or live with them.Power becomes the means by which we present socially what otherwise would not be knowable. Yes, I understand this is a definition for power and that I have resisted making one until now. It’s just that someone needed to say it and I can’t find anyone who has been so explicit about this before. If you think I am wrong about this, please let me know.ReferencesGiddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.Image: SHEVTS This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drrobdalton.substack.com